Hi Brian,

I was in your msdn webcast today and asked about the view manager question. Your session was very helpful. You mentioned in the meeting that Visual Studio designer messes things up during form inheritance. I see in Visual Studio 2003 there is a way to derive a windows form and user control. However, you will have to say you are inheriting from a form or control, not just creating a new form and editing the base class. That seems to keep designers pretty happy. Are you saying it will still happen with this form inheritance feature they added?

Thanks,

Santanu

(I sent this to the email address you provided in the webcast but it came back undelivered, not sure why, so I'm posting it here.)

I watched your webcast on Tuesday and thought it was a really good intro to the UIP. We are looking at using the UIPv2 for a fairly large internal project, and I have been trying to sell it as the solution to many of our UI requirements. I think it's working.

I have a question about the use of State that I'm hoping you can help with. This seems like it is probably more of a preference thing, but I'm interested in your thoughts. Specifically, I'm struggling with the pros and cons of using a strongly-typed State vs. using the controller as a facade to the generic UIP State class which would hold some number of business entities.

In the latter scenario, I can think of the business entities as my model, and only use the controller to prevent the views from having to know the keys I use to store them in the State. The state's job is just to handle persistence for the task (assuming all the business entities are serializable).

I noticed that you used a strongly typed ProblemTicket state class in your HelpDesk example. You then access this through the controller and use it's properties directly. This is slick in the example, but seems like it might be time-consuming if you have a lot of different business data you neeed access to that changes for each individual task/controller combination. Is this an accurate view of things? Is there an advantage of strongly typed state that I'm missing?

Hi Santanu,
No, the designer seems to stay pretty happy if you do your initial derivation from the base class by using the Add Inherited Form functionality in VS2003. Just wanted to point out the issue in case people didn't remember to use that approach, which I should have pointed out in the first place. :)

Hi Ben,
I am a big fan of strong typing, so I always lean in that direction when I can. However, that doesn't mean that I would create a contrived base object that contained all my other objects just so I could get it out of the state store in a strongly typed way.

It is in fact easier to use the hashtable built in state object, and you can stuff your custom objects in there just as easily and have them serialized out from there. So as long as the number of keys you have to keep track of doesn't get out of hand, I think that approach is fine too.

It also works around the fact that deriving from the State base class forces you to implement ISerializable, which can be a pain. I used the SerializationUtil class created by my associate Juval Lowy in his book Programming .NET Components to make it easy, but it is a constraint you have to deal with to use a custom strongly typed object out of the state store.

The only other advantage I can think of is that because you have to implement ISerializable, you could use that as a chance to do additional validation of the data as it comes and goes from the store if you needed to.

Hope that helps.
Brian

Hi Brian, I downloaded your webcast and have just finished watching it. It was an excellent overview and exactly what I needed to convince me to at least give the UIPAB a try. At the end you mentioned that you didn't have enough time to go into the specifics of using querystrings for state peristence. You ominously remarked that there may be some issues with that. when you have the time, could you elaborate? Meanwhile I'm going to go through the sample code and see what I can come up with on my own.

Thanks

Hi,
I vaguely remember the remark, but off the top of my head I can't think of any issue with using THE DATA that is in a query string. I think maybe what I was thinking is if you were to store a URL with embedded querystring values to a page that was in the middle of a UIP task, and then tried to use that to restart the task, that would not work because you can't navigate to a page that is part of a UIP task unless the task has been started through the UIPManager from some other page or code. But if there is a task in progress and there is state being passed between pages by querystrings, you could certainly extract that data in a given page and store the values into the UIP state persistence. But if you are within a task and passing data by query string between pages, then you are defeating some of the purpose of using UIP in the first place - decoupling the intimate knowledge from one page about what another page needs and how to get there.

Hope that helps.
Brian

Any plans (or extensions) of extending the AP for WebParts?

Hi,

I came up to this blog when I was searching the web trying to find any htmls writing on UIPAB.
I would like in this comment to ask one particular question regarding web application development using UIPAB.
I am developing some web app. My starting web form is actually frameset consisting of treeview on the left and main webform on the right, which are not part of the UIP task.I was wondering, how can I start the new task from the main form and pass initial arguments within? Overloaded methods for starting the task in web app do not support any kind of arguments passing.
Normaly, without UIP I would pass the parameters with querystring, or worse put it in session object.

I came up to one solution. That would be to start that task from another task linking with controller method "OnStartTask", because, that way it is possible to pass parameters with ArgumentsHolder class. But, the form that starts the new task (main form) is not part of the UIP, so this idea fails. Concerning this, the question could be formed also like this: How can I start UIP task in a new IE window?


Thanks in advance for trying to solve this problem.
Cheers

Srdjan
Belgrade, SCG

That is my question also...how can I start up a UIP task in a new window?